Opinion Brief: Thursday, Aug, 7, 2014

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Good evening, subscribers. So Justin Trudeau’s written an autobiography — which seems like a leap for a man who barely qualifies as middle-aged. Still, if Bieber could do it, the bar was pretty low to begin with.

The book is an election prop, of course, and Liberals hope it’ll do for the Dauphin what Straight from the Heart did for Chrétien. Tasha Kheiriddin calls it misguided, given that Justin’s recollections of a gilded childhood can only hammer home the fact that he has very little in common with the average Canadian. “He hasn’t had to worry about getting an education. He hasn’t fretted about keeping a roof over his head. Every door has been open to him — because of his father’s accomplishments.”

From our good friends at The Tyee we have Rafe Mair with a radical idea for getting the PMO’s boot off the necks of our MPs: Make every confidence vote in the House of Commons a secret ballot. “No government MP dares oppose his government on a free vote. The only way to hold the prime minister to account is to make sure he doesn’t know in advance how MPs — even his own — are going to vote.”

Recently, Canadians got a sample of how China deals with diplomatic pressure when it charged a Canadian couple with espionage. Jonathan Manthorpe says that’s nothing compared to the pressure Beijing is putting on its neighbours in the South China Sea — pressure in the form of illegal land-grabs and sabre-ratting. “Beijing has dismissed all criticism of its activities by simply asserting that it has ‘indisputable sovereignty’ over most of the South China Sea. ‘The Spratly Islands are China’s intrinsic territory, and what China does or doesn’t do is up to the Chinese government,’ a spokesman told Reuters.”